HealthContentAdvisors

Online Database To Track (and Stop) Infectious Diseases Worldwide

• Posted July 9th 2008
• by Marji

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have launched HealthMap, a data-mining project aimed at stopping infectious diseases. HealthMap is an automated system that scours news services and online discussion forms and collect the information about worldwide emerging health threats.

The goal is to identify potential disease outbreaks in local areas before health agencies such as the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognize them as health threats. HealthMap is tracking more than 200 countries.

Once the news content is collected, HealthMap tracks and compiles reports (from government warnings and blog conversations) and makes the information available on its web site for free. A variety of different algorithms are used to wade through the information to accurately identify trends.

HealthMap uses a color-coded reference system overlaid on a world map to highlight the location of disease-related news. Red or “hot” icons identify areas where there are multiple reports of illness. When public health agencies declare an outbreak or epidemic, HealthMap continues its scan to keep both researchers and consumers updated.

This is a very interesting idea. It’s certainly not a new idea to collect information from a wide range of online sources and offer analysis on that data. But the potential impact HealthMap could have on society is worth noting. The creators behind HealthMap expect to gain a better understand of emerging health threats and even identify them before the most powerful health agencies in the world. If they can accomplish this, everyone will know what HealthMap is.